"Part of a written/spoken-word project I'm working on concerned with the 4 suits of elements.

The Spark, causality, an entire chain of consequence spiralling outwards.

This glowing magical nectar, stolen by Prometheus from the gods and fenced, in turn, to man with dire justice exacted upon both parties. Dragging us out of our Neanderthal fug and blazing our way forwards through time, marching over history, conquering with the weapons we forge, no longer content with rock and stick, through to our inevitable mass cremation. Sucking oxygen and converting to pure destructive energy, a parallel is drawn.

At the heart of our solar system lies a gas giant, greater than comprehension, temperature beyond understanding, an ever watchful eye, surveying its suspendedmicro-marble collection, keeping everything hanging just so.

With fire comes movement, progress, transport, the steam engine, coal driven power plants and combustion engines. We burn up the fossil-fuel paved carriageway behind us with juggernaught mass. Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear less charred than they are.

Wands, the renewing flame. Thoth attributes fire to Will. Those bound to this house are hot of temperament, passionate, driven, destructive. Fire concerns itself with the future, as all that lies in its wake is used up and devoid of nutrition.

Tarkovsky shows us over the image of the burning house, the burning barn, the sacrifice of possession and livelihood. A purging, a banishing. The lighting of a ceremonial candle to this ritual hungry, deity of consumption. The Nightclubs of our soul, lie torched in an inside insurance-job.

As children, fire holds wonder, we scry in the flame for dragon’s tails, we write letters to Santa and offer them up, an invocation, a will driven sacrament, naïve magic. As adults, the veil is less opaque, something deeper, more frightening, more powerful than us lives within, glimpses of another realm. We are its keepers, but it, our master. Cerberus juts three crackling, snarling jaws into our physical. Hades whispers to us, subsonic, hidden in the white noise.

Burn the undead and they cannot rise. We made them this way when we became them."

By means of water-tape theory, all emotion records directly into the fabric of our surroundings, every emotional twinge imprinted deep within building, within wood and brick, in every particle of moisture within the clay. Time trickles through everything, clinging to its hydrogenised host, coming back into the vast single consciousness of the water table.

Our human condition leads us to stare into this measured passage of time at moments of inner turmoil, are we looking for answers? Do we wish the rumble of static that clouds our thoughts washed away? Absolved? Transmuted into this neverending conveyor belt away from the here and now and deposited like silt in another place, somewhere else, across the sea?

We look to bridge disasters and suicides; the spanning of such an ancient, infinite entity invites disaster. Tiptoeing across the sleeping jaws of an alligator, a subconscious, dream-twitch brings about catastrophe. Poseidon claims the souls of those who bob and sink, whose bodies lie still in the deep, unfound, dissipating their organic matter back to source, memorialised in populist shortbread tin prose by the like of McGonagall.

The same water flows past us now as it once did our fathers who brought us into being, our grandfathers who fought great atrocities, and back further yet, infinitely past their grandfathers who toiled and saw hardship in the name of progress. The same water, altered, now loaded up with generations upon generations of pollutants and chemicals, the diluted effluent of evolution that our ancestors would find abhorrent, haunts us and flows again through our being.

Twice a day the tides change, and the information contained feeds back on itself, the psychological backwash as heavy as the spate volume of water makes the riverbanks heave under its incalculable weight.

We are beings of the water; it gives us life and context, an infinite time machine in deep black and quicksilver trapped in a constant mutual state of both record and playback, eroding and replenishing all. Everything that ever was, and ever will be will one day be crushed and washed into each other. Time fills our lungs and drowns us.

"

Rere-up of previous Erstlaub/TVO/Broken 20 post in one last attempt at aggregation...

We are all broken - indisputably, Broken20_0.5 brings "drones, noise, clipped beats, rumbling bass". But to these ears what it most brings is a striking melding of protaganists TVO & Erstlaub into two sides of the same genre-defying, richly experimental & viscerally intense post-techno coin (appropriate image for a 3"...).

The two pieces bleed into each other in fascinating ways. Keep Away From Fire And Flames is the sound of a delicate drone infusion onto a notably restrained & modulated bed of skippy beats. Meanwhile, Entering The Eye Of The Storm squirts a faintly oriental, exuberant pipe* over a boldly slashing, clanking base unfamiliar from earlier Erst. *not a pipe really, just a sound somewhat like one...

Separately, a new B20 artist: "Isodyne is a musician and dj from Edinburgh; he’s also recorded and worked under his own name, Patrick Walker, as well as AVX/Avionix and is perhaps best known currently for his work as half of Forward Strategy Group."